Today, in a 'Visual Age' 'inundated' by images, media communication is dominated by the text-picture media (newspapers, magazines, books, posters, comics, etc.) and the picture-text media (films, TV, video clips, Internet). In these media, the attempt is made to establish a typical visual idiom alongside the text, a visual Esperanto or accumulation of 'visiotypes' designed as a guarantee of universal comprehensibility. Hence there is a need for an approach providing access to the images, texts and text-picture combinations, the theories about them in currency, and the central realizations of these theories in the praxis of the said media. The book sets out to provide such access, casting light in its later chapters on the relationship between language and art in the 20th century.